In order to increase the size of a striped logical volume, there must be enough free space on the underlying physical volumes that make up the volume group to support the stripe. For example, if you have a two-way stripe that that uses up an entire volume group, adding a single physical volume to the volume group will not enable you to extend the stripe. Instead, you must add at least two physical volumes to the volume group.

For example, consider a volume group vg that consists of two underlying physical volumes, as displayed with the following vgs command.

# vgs
  VG   #PV #LV #SN Attr   VSize   VFree
  vg     2   0   0 wz--n- 271.31G 271.31G

You can create a stripe using the entire amount of space in the volume group.

# lvcreate -n stripe1 -L 271.31G -i 2 vg
  Using default stripesize 64.00 KB
  Rounding up size to full physical extent 271.31 GB
  Logical volume "stripe1" created
# lvs -a -o +devices
  LV      VG   Attr   LSize   Origin Snap%  Move Log Copy%  Devices
  stripe1 vg   -wi-a- 271.31G                               /dev/sda1(0),/dev/sdb1(0)

Note that the volume group now has no more free space.

# vgs
  VG   #PV #LV #SN Attr   VSize   VFree
  vg     2   1   0 wz--n- 271.31G    0

The following command adds another physical volume to the volume group, which then has 135G of additional space.

# vgextend vg /dev/sdc1
  Volume group "vg" successfully extended
# vgs
  VG   #PV #LV #SN Attr   VSize   VFree
  vg     3   1   0 wz--n- 406.97G 135.66G

At this point you cannot extend the striped logical volume to the full size of the volume group, because two underlying devices are needed in order to stripe the data.

# lvextend vg/stripe1 -L 406G
  Using stripesize of last segment 64.00 KB
  Extending logical volume stripe1 to 406.00 GB
  Insufficient suitable allocatable extents for logical volume stripe1: 34480 
more required

To extend the striped logical volume, add another physical volume and then extend the logical volume. In this example, having added two physical volumes to the volume group we can extend the logical volume 5A to the full size of the volume group.

# vgextend vg /dev/sdd1
  Volume group "vg" successfully extended
# vgs
  VG   #PV #LV #SN Attr   VSize   VFree
  vg     4   1   0 wz--n- 542.62G 271.31G
# lvextend vg/stripe1 -L 542G
  Using stripesize of last segment 64.00 KB
  Extending logical volume stripe1 to 542.00 GB
  Logical volume stripe1 successfully resized

If you do not have enough underlying physical devices to extend the striped logical volume, it is possible to extend the volume anyway if it does not matter that the extension is not striped, which may result in uneven performance. When adding space to the logical volume, the default operation is to use the same striping paramgers of the last segment of the existing logical volume, but you can override those parameters. The following example extends the existing striped logical volume to use the remaining free space after the initial lvextend command fails.

# lvextend vg/stripe1 -L 406G
  Using stripesize of last segment 64.00 KB
  Extending logical volume stripe1 to 406.00 GB
  Insufficient suitable allocatable extents for logical volume stripe1: 34480 
more required
# lvextend -iL -l+100%FREE vg/stripe1